xx j v PREFACE. 



guished, and I am not afraid of directing your attention a little more closely to its 

 movements, to the men and women who t got their chief enjoyment out of it, and to 

 the very varied instincts or predilections which supplied the motive power. 



The position of Racing in social life before the end of the sixteenth century was 

 not very distinctive ; but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it becomes 

 an intimate and important part of the general study of manners, for among the 

 names handed down in the traditions of the early Turf are those of men who were 

 not only most eminent in public life but also most interesting and remarkable in 

 their personalities. It will be one of my endeavours to give a direct impression 

 of the relation of Racing to other phases of contemporary social life, of the attitude 

 of society towards it, and of the spirit in which it was followed by its greatest 

 devotees. Another of my desires is to give such an account of these men and 

 women, within my limits, as may enable the reader to get a fair idea of the world in 

 which they lived. 



Two opposite difficulties beset this ideal. For the first part of it the direct 

 material is slight. The chief letter-writers and writers of memoirs were, unhappily, 

 not interested in Racing. It follows from this that they neither wrote much about it 

 themselves, nor did the Racing friends whose letters to them we possess discourse at 

 any length upon the subject. It is mainly by indirect hints that our impressions are 

 gradually built up, and an appeal must sometimes be made to the sympathetic 

 imagination of the sporting reader. For the second part of the subject, however, 

 the material is almost too abundant. The difficulty is to know where to stop when 

 one begins to write of the careers and characters of some of the men who were 

 constant to Newmarket Heath, and a rigorous selection of typical instances becomes 

 inevitable. On the whole I have found it profitable and convenient to fuse the two 

 kinds of material, and by imagination on the one hand and selection on the other to 

 attempt a general picture of English society on its Racing side, without either 

 emphasising the specialties of the Turf chronicler to a wearisome extent, or 

 trespassing too far in the special province of the general historian. 



In such a task as this, the aid of illustrations becomes practically inevitable, 

 and I have been content to accept their many drawbacks for the sake of the 

 balance of interest and information which, as a whole, they must convey. In 

 the matter of the artistic rendering of the thoroughbred, the pendulum has swung 

 from the stiffness of Barlow or Tillemen in the seventeenth century, through the 

 conventions of Sartorius, to the; instantaneous photograph of to-day. In all that 



